Doug's "frustration" dreams and Doug's attempt to keep up with four TV series

(14:47:43 CDT)

Doug's "frustration" dreams and Doug's attempt to keep up with four TV series

I am listening to Ensiferum's Ensiferum (yes, a self-titled CD). CDs like this make me weep for American Metal, which still focuses on a mixture of (1) getting in the squares' collective face and (2) living it up¹! #1 has inspired a hefty dose of Satanic imagery and sexism. #2 has inspired a mixture of sexism and drug abuse and adolescent attitude. Then you look at Euro-metal, and you get mature concept albums and progressive, jazz-fused metal. Sure, you still get drugs and Satan, but they handle it classier. Even seem to have more fun with it at the same time. Lot of the metal-heads I know (usually older men) are big into the hair-metal and glam sounds from the 80s metal scene, or early Thrash. I can do the early Thrash, but the Hair-Glam sound really only works for me ironically. I know it sounds silly to listen to Viking metal and hate on Glam, but man.

Ok, Metal aside. One of the big constants in my life recently is something I call frustration dreams. Most of my dreams, at least most of the ones I have had and remember since puberty, are nightmares, or at least seem that way (some of which play with nightmare elements in odd ways, or have nightmare elements only as an aside), so maybe these are low-key nightmares. The kind of nightmares where it is not horror you are facing down, but merely the consistent lack of comfort. I suppose a dream therapist would tell me that I feel unfulfilled, or that I am sexually deprived, depraved, or all of the above. Maybe this is meant to represent a tiredness. Maybe I am tired of climbing? Maybe I feel I have not climbed enough. Really, you can say any old thing in dream therapy and sound half-right.

Last night's dream is a good example. I went to live with my brother Danny, who was staying in a large, ocean-side house near Florida. Except, when I got down there, the dream house had been lost due to some glitch (like, Danny hadn't been keeping up with a low-level, routine maintenance or something). So, there was a nearby house, that was kind of like a trailer in shape and interior, but made out of a brick of some sort. Picture one of the cheap cement houses you see from time to time, except maybe a little longer. In the dream, it seems like it was meant to be two houses but they barrier-wall between them had been knocked down, so it made a single, two-bedroom house. Anyhow, I get down there, realize this is my house, and am generally ok with it. Except there is no view of the ocean, here, because of some angle of the hillside. We have to go up into the land owned by the current person staying in the dream house, which is frowned upon. And there were other little upsets, but about the time I woke up, there was some fight because the concrete house only had a tiny septic tank and though Danny and I had barely used it, they were trying to blame us for sort of water-leak damage. Constant, piss-anty frustrations.

Another dream involved trying to find an ID card or something to return to the video store or something (I remember needing to find something kind of small but cannot remember what or why). The whole dream was just searching everywhere and not finding it. Dreams with failed interviews, or missed chances, or trying to find someone to ask about something and never making it. Man.

In something like happier news, or at least more neutral news, I am trying to watch four (4!) tv serials while they are currently in rotation. Here's a confession, I've never made one. In all my years as a TV watcher, off and on, I have never kept up with a plot-driven—sitcoms don't quite count—series more than about half a season. The X-Files was kind of close, but I mostly watched a half-season of every season, and caught the story in various re-run arcs and made do with it. If you do not include things like downloading eps and watching them all later² or buying the series on DVD, that is. In fact, the DVD method has been my de facto method of watching TV for a while. This year, I've been trying out the kind of similar iTunes method, except it allows me to buy the show as it is going on, and so I'm including this in the same category as watching the show "in real time". Since I work/class during prime-time, I would have to use a DVR, and I might as well just use iTunes, you know?

Most of my friends (half of which claim to be anti-TV, heh) follow several series closely, and so I have never been able to really get into that bit of their life. That's partly why I did it. I also have always wondered about things. Like, when I am watching a show on DVD and a lot of the plot-twists and similar moments come just minutes or hours after the previous episodes that built them up (assuming I watch a couple or three eps at a time), instead of weeks or months; how does this change the desired effect?

The four series I am watching are Bored to Death (since I rarely work on Sunday nights, this is the one that I getting to watch as it initially airs, instead of largely through iTunes), Flash Forward (the one I am most concerned about, since it might pull a Lost and attempt a heavy dose of stalling for time), Glee (which is sort of the light hearted guilty pleasure of the bunch), and Stargate: Universe (which I need more data to make a conclusion about).

I think, of them, Bored to Death is going to be my favorite. I like the half-hour time limit and I like the random little erudite and literary jokes drifting in the middle of sex and fart jokes. Glee has some memorable moments, but each episodes ups the Drama Quotient and flattens the Music Quotient to an after-thought. SG:U is a nice update for a series that felt kind of tried and tested early on, but needs a little more Stargate in it. Finally, as I said before, Flash Forward is mostly going to work if they don't spend the whole time campaigning for a second season. Not that they have yet, but they are mostly asking questions right now.

There is currently about a 50% chance I am going to drop one of them, about a 15% chance I will drop all four and just wait for the DVDs.

Si Vales, Valeo

1: Let it be known that I am mostly bashing the central, commercial variation of American metal. There are bands like Between the Buried and Me releasing creative, progressive stuff. I highly recommend them. Also, in the melodeath (melodic death metal) field, there is an excellent small-label album called Night of the Black Wyvern, by the band Utopia Banished, for free-to-stream on Magnatune.

2: There have been a few animes or live action shows from Japan that I would download about as soon as they were translated and watch through, the most recent being Kamen Rider Kiva, but these are kind of cheats. Kind of...

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